Egypt seen from space last night via NOAA-20 (Colorized) Few places on Earth illustrate the relationship between geography and civilization as dramatically as Egypt at night. More than 95 percent of Egypt's population lives on just a small fraction of its land, concentrated along the Nile River and within the fertile Nile Delta. From orbit, the river appears as a brilliant ribbon of light cutting through thousands of square miles of nearly uninhabited Sahara Desert. The brightest cluster is Greater Cairo, one of the largest metropolitan areas in Africa and the Middle East, with more than 20 million residents. The illuminated fan spreading northward is the Nile Delta, one of the world's most productive agricultural regions for over 5,000 years. The narrow chain of lights continuing south follows the Nile Valley, where cities and farmland remain closely tied to the annual floodplain first exploited by the ancient Egyptians. The NOAA-20 satellite, launched in 2017 as part of the Joint Polar Satellite System, circles Earth about 14 times each day. Images such as this are often colorized after capture to enhance contrast and geographic features, rather than representing the scene exactly as the human eye would see it from space. Around 97 percent of Egypt's population lives within about 12 miles (20 kilometers) of the Nile River, even though that corridor represents less than 4 percent of the country's total land area. #archaeohistories